How diplomacy saved the COP21 Paris Climate Conference, but now, can we save ourselves?

Abstract

To solve a problem, three things are necessary: awareness, means, and will. The 2015 COP21 Paris accord was a masterful, perhaps even world-saving, diplomatic advance toward making the world aware of climate change. Some of that success may have been because publications from the IPCC and the National Academy of Science were made available, on line, as prepublication offerings, in order to be widely viewed before the Paris Climate Conference. This provided diplomats and negotiators with the latest information about climate change, its nearness in time, its consequences, and how well current mitigation technologies can succeed. Whatever the reasons, the Paris Climate Conference, was a success. Leaders of 195 nations agreed that climate change is a real and present danger to life as is known to all. This important understanding was accomplished despite the presentation of well established scientific facts which, without very diplomatic handling, could easily have evoked overwhelming political opposition to an agreement and thus another COP failure. In this paper, the fact that how some scientific truths, written specifically to be overlooked, were presented in order to prepare COP21 participants for the conference is explained. Besides, the effectiveness and efficiency of currently favored mitigation policies, the extent of ongoing progress to better ones, and finally, how a new appreciation of climate change consequences can strengthen the will of nation states and industries to work toward solutions are evaluated.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

COP21 / Paris / climate / agreement / offsets / mitigation / IPCC

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the following colleagues for their many helpful suggestions in this and earlier versions of the manuscript: Antonio Ciucci, Dennis Searcy, Karen Searcy, Randy O. Wayne. Most of all, we thank Gabriella B. Mulcahy for tireless and insightful editing and corrections. D. Nathaniel Mulcahy conceived and outlined the paper while David L. Mulcahy did literature research.

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests.

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